Chapter 257 Night Four

Chapter 257 Night Four
ASHER'S POV

It was two-twenty in the morning, and I was standing in the Drake kitchen with my daughter on my shoulder, a bottle warming in a pan on the stove. We don't own the machine that does that for you. I've refused on principle.

We were allowed to take Rosa home on the fourth day and currently, the Drake house has become my new home. April and I take turns to watch our daughter.

Tonight I was watching her because April has work at the sport tv station. Rosa had started up with the noise she makes before the real noise starts. I got to her on the first one.

Her mother had offered. My mother offered twice. Mrs. Drake had stood right there in that kitchen back in September and told me she'd take every night of it, that I could go sleep in my own bed like a person.

I said no. I meant it at the time.

I shifted Rosa higher on my shoulder and lifted the bottle out of the pan with two fingers, testing it against my wrist. Somewhere around three in the morning on night two, I'd stopped being sure the no had ever really been about April.

A man who says he'll do something and then lets two women in their fifties do it for him instead is a particular kind of man. I've been close enough to that man before to know the smell of him.

Rosa took about an ounce and then fell asleep on the bottle like it was a personal insult to me. I propped my phone up against the sugar bowl. The stream ran four hours behind, from a game she'd worked that night, and there she was down on the boards in her coat, microphone up, doing her forty seconds between periods on some defenseman's shoulder.

She doesn't sound like herself on air — slower, warmer. There's a thing she does with her hands out there that she never does standing in a kitchen. Eleven seconds in, she dropped all of it and just told me about a man's shoulder.

I stood there in the dark with my daughter asleep against me and watched April do her job on a nine-inch screen. Nothing has ever pleased me that much.

She called at ten past three, because she knows exactly what time Rosa does this.

"Is she up?"

"She's on me. She's been asleep for twenty minutes and I'm not moving."

"Put her back down."

"Absolutely not."

"Asher."

"You did the shoulder thing well."

The pause ran long enough that I checked to see if the call had dropped.

"You watched it."

"I watch all of them. I'm four for four."

She let that sit for a second.

"Go to sleep," April said, and her voice wasn't quite right, and neither of us went near it.

~~

Christmas came, and the house filled up again. Bottles lined the counter beside a bowl of nuts nobody had touched since last year. Tiny clothes hung drying over the back of a chair. Linda had put up every decoration in the house, including the ones that don't work anymore. Rosa was dressed in the outfit April insists is necessary for photographs. She'd already been sick on it twice.

Ethan came through the door without a single greeting for any adult in it.

"Where is she."

"Hello to you as well," Ares said, coming in behind him with both arms full of bags.

Ethan found the crib. "Hey, little girl."

Rosa kicked both legs at him, and his whole face opened up.

"She remembers me."

"She's six months old," Ares said.

"We're babysitting," Ethan announced.

April didn't look up. "No."

"Why not," Ares said.

"Because you two cannot get through ten minutes without a fight."

"We can be responsible."

"Extremely responsible," Ethan said, seriously, to a woman holding a baby.

April looked over at me. I put a hand over the bottom half of my face.

"Don't encourage them."

"April, I am her uncle."

"And I am her other uncle," Ares said.

"Fine," April said. "I'm standing right there."

The first job was a diaper, and Ethan volunteered for it. He'll regret that for years. He got it open and just stopped.

"Why is there this much going on."

"She's a baby," Ares said.

"That does not answer the question."

April stood in the doorway with both hands over her face. Ares supervised from eighteen inches away, which is about his contribution to most situations.

"You're doing that wrong."

"I am not."

"You have to lift her legs."

"I know how a diaper works."

"You clearly do not."

"Have you ever changed one?"

Ares took a beat too long to answer. "No."

"Then be quiet."

Ares took the bottle and made a whole production of it, testing the temperature against his own wrist exactly the way they do in the movies.

"Why are you behaving like a professional."

"Because I read the instructions."

"I could read instructions."

"You do not read instructions."

"I read important ones."

"Exactly," Ares said.

Rosa turned her face away from the bottle and started up. They both froze, Ares still holding the bottle out in front of him like an offering that had just been declined.

"What do we do."

"Why is that my department?"

"You're holding the food."

"She's already crying."

April and I stood there in the doorway and didn't step in, because we're not saints.

Ethan got her up against his chest, and she quit inside four seconds, then took a fistful of his shirt and held on. He didn't say anything for a second.

"She likes me."

"Traitor," Ares said.

"You hear that. She chose me."

"She has terrible judgment. She's six months old."

Ares stood behind the two of them for ten minutes, straightening that blanket every time it shifted a quarter inch. I've known Ethan Drake since I was eleven years old. He's stood with me in a hospital corridor, and in a parking lot, and once in a room where I said things to his sister that I still can't take back. Tonight he was walking her up and down a hallway, telling her about a defenseman who talks during video.

Later, they were all in the front room, and Rosa made the rounds of every one of them. Somebody had an opinion about the food. The music went on for a while, then somebody turned it down. Tom fell asleep in his chair by nine and denied it afterward. Same house. Same walls, same stairs, same kitchen. Last winter there'd been people whispering in it.

April had her head on my shoulder, her feet up, a glass in her hand she wasn't drinking from.

"What."

"Nothing."

"You're doing the face."

"I don't have a face," I said, and took her hand.

She let that sit for about a minute.

"I need to tell you something, and I've been picking the moment for a while."

"That's a terrible way to start."

"There's no good way." She didn't lift her head off my shoulder. "The board at the arena. Down at the near end, where I shoot from."

"What about it."

"The sponsor's off it," April said. "The panel's still there. They've put the athletics logo over the top of it, in the same blue. If you weren't looking for it you'd never know."

"They pulled out?"

"Nobody pulled out. Nobody announced anything. It's just gone."

"When did you notice."

"Second game I worked."

"April, that was September."

"Yes."

Her eyes stayed on the room. Her mother was busy with something at a tin, and Rosa was asleep against Ares with his hand flat on her back.

"You've had that for three months."

"I've had it for three months," April said, "and I've spent all of it deciding, and I've decided. Go and get your coat off the hook so we can talk in the yard."